Intel 'Skylake' Core i7-6700K performance reportedly revealed

Intel is gearing up to release their next-generation Skylake processors as early as next week, but before they've been able to release any official information, a set of benchmarks detailing the flagship Skylake CPU's performance have leaked onto the web.

The benchmarks come from Chinese website PCOnline, and peg the Skylake-based Intel Core i7-6700K against the Haswell Core i7-4790K and the six-core Haswell-E i7-5820K. The i7-6700K is reportedly a four-core, eight-thread product clocked at 4.0 GHz with a boost of 4.2 GHz and 8 MB of L3 cache. Like all of Intel's Skylake products, it will be built using a 14nm manufacturing process.

PCOnline allegedly benchmarked the Core i7-6700K on a Z170-based motherboard with 8 GB of memory, and with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti for graphics workloads. As expected, the i7-6700K was marginally faster than the i7-4790K across a range of CPU-limited benchmarks.

The biggest gains in performance came when comparing Skylake to Haswell in 3D-heavy workloads. The i7-6700K was allegedly faster across the board in these situations when paired with a GTX 980 Ti, and sometimes managed to beat the six-core i7-5820K.

The flagship Core i7-6700K is expected to feature a 95W TDP, higher than current Haswell SKUs. However, the processor will reportedly use less power during CPU workloads than Haswell due to a more efficient architecture and a die shrink to 14nm, with extra TDP headroom going to more beefy integrated graphics than previous flagship SKUs.

At this stage, these benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt. We'll get a much better look at how Skylake performs when the CPUs arrive in our hands shortly.